# Complex privacy ecosystems in play | Julio - Jaya - Sebastian | Web3Privacy Now Berlin Meetup 2024

- Channel: [Ethereum Cypherpunk Congress](https://streameth.org/ethereum-cypherpunk-congress)
- Date: 2024-10-07
- Duration: 44:34
- Topics: Education
- Watch: https://streameth.org/watch/yt-3qArHXOw2b0
- YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3qArHXOw2b0

## Description

Complex privacy ecosystems in play: mixnet example | W3PN Berlin Meetup 

Jaya x Nym
Head of Stragegy x Nym
https://x.com/jayapapaya
https://www.jayapapaya.xyz

Sebastian x HOPR
VP technology @GnosisDAO | founder @hoprnet
https://x.com/SCBuergel

Moderator: 
Julio Linares x Poetic Technologies
https://x.com/Julio_Linares_
http://poeticte.ch

------------

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## Transcript

[Applause] uh we're continuing and uh hulio where are you I cannot see you a you're there uh come uh come on stage Julio is a moderator of the next dialogue uh ja from Nim Sebastian from Hopper uh this uh dialogue originated from Li's idea like let's talk about infrastructure and let's put people on stage who can build uh constructive Di in times of uh constant challenges and uh Julio is a nice oh uh moderator and and I would say somehow we have another writer in our room and Julio Julio's book will be published next year decolonizing money or decolonized money decolonizing money uh looking forward uh uh Julio spent lots of time with David greber that I personally super love and uh it will be interesting to see how uh Grabber ideas continue in our life um and yeah let's talk about infrastructure let's talk about uh how infrastructural projects uh enable tangible products and what are the sustainable challenges we see in the future how much uh so first I forgot one small thing it's kind of hybrid format if someone would want to show something like kind of like five slides we can do experimental way we don't need to be this kind of like no no you're all right you're right super super we we're super right how much time do we have in total uh half an hour more or L thank you um so first of all I want everyone to stand up for like few seconds just to move a bit the body we're going to mix a bit our pelvis and our back a bit so try to like move a bit in circles just try to like mix the tension in your body traffic that's going on through your brains through your nervous systems thank you you I've he people going to ZK conferences and talking about MPC and you know things like that so let's try to bring it a bit to the body and just yeah so maybe jump a bit if you if you need it check it off nice thank you so much so welcome everyone uh to this panel um I'm very uh happy to be uh here with two very great people who are working on mixnet I believe this is probably one of the first times that two mixet projects meet there are not so many um I wish a person from this space could be here his name is leaf uh he runs a project called cuts and post as well uh uh Leaf if you're here maybe come he's probably downstairs smoking somewhere um so um first of all I would like you both to introduce yourselves uh who you are what are your interest uh and what are the projects that you're working on and then we can move on into what is a mixet so first sure um so my name is Ja and uh I have the kind of very fancy title of Chief strategy officer at Nim but all that really means is um I work very closely with our core developer team to how how to kind of like relate the Deep technical work that they're doing to the external World um and that involves a lot of work across um I lead the ecosystem team that grows our network of operator um I lead the communications and marketing team for the time being um and a number of other projects in the company um my personal background is a little bit of a mixed bag um like let's say theoretically speaking from the realm of digital geography um I've been kind of thinking and writing and doing research and doing bits and pieces of Technology projects for um a couple decades now that all focus on uh Power effectively um and to me right now privacy is one of the main levers to shift dynamics of power in the world um and uh privacy technology that especially combines you know clear thinking around economics can do that even more effectively why because um surveillance is not just a technical problem is also an economic problem when we're facing a surveillance business model that runs the internet so um that's why I'm here that's why I'm very you know passionate and excited to be working on the Nim project um and I think mix Nets in general are going to become increasingly important because uh we're not just looking at uh traditional surveillance we're looking at much more kind of fine grain surveillance that's driven by Machine learning um and machine learning looks at not so much your data really but your metadata so these are this is the kind of Realm that I'm working on um over to you Sebastian thank you yeah so I'm Sebastian I'm founder of Hopper um it's a yeah it's also mixnet project that I've been working on for the past four years um have been working another five years I think in a crypto space before that um yeah been BAS Bally active in the space since ethereum launched which absolutely changed my life like it's something that was like absolutely mesmerizing to me and ethereum originally was pitched kind of as this world computer which I thought was very sci-fi and ethereum had actually a way to send data um that was called whisper that kind of moved a little bit more in the background and I find it very sad because I thought hey you know actually having this entire technology stack properly decentralized is something that makes a lot of sense to me have resilient technologies that we can build stuff on um because another experience that I made was working in a startup that was a fintech and my conclusion from one year of fintech was this is absolutely broken this does not work this is not Innovation and everybody stands in your way so uh permissionless Innovation is something that resonates very strongly with me and yeah um I saw absence of a go-to solution to send data privately as something that should be built and that's uh yeah how we started Hopper nice um so just a show of hands who here knows what a mix net is okay but there is still like I would say 30% hands don't know so I would say um maybe let's start from the basics uh uh let's maybe have a trialogue between those three what is a mixnet um how is it different from let's say something like a VPN at what level of the stack of the technical stack of the internet does it does it work and you mentioned metadata you mentioned power you mentioned permission is innovation um how are these things W woven together in the Mix net that you're doing um sure so uh let's see a mixnet um is different to a traditional VPN in the sense that um instead of just routing your traffic through you know some service somewhere which effectively just moves the trust from you know you trusting your is ISP provider to you trusting your VPN provider what a mixnet does is it routes your your traffic through several Hops and not just does the routing but actually mixes your traffic with other people's traffic so what that does is effectively um it obscures the patterns of communication and obscures the metadata of communication which means that if someone's watching the network um even if they're analyzing the uh let's say the patterns of of packets routing through the network they're unable to actually trace a packet from the sender to the receiver um so this provides you know unlinkability it provides a number of privacy properties um and it's and it's going to become increasingly important moving into the future yeah I think that was pretty excellent I have nothing to add to that uh I would I would take the second part of the question then like how do you use then how does it connect to stuff so computers are pretty stupid and don't do much right so back in the days um when people started coming up with a thing that's called the internet now um computers didn't speak the language of the internet and you needed to install something even in I think the earlier versions of Windows that taught your computer to speak that language called tcpip which is basically just a protocol to send data from A to B now computers speak that language which is great now there's other languages living on top of that such as you know HTTP which now you don't even have to type in a browser anymore I think the Next Generation might not even know what HTTP is so um and and basically this was great technology that was invented to send data from A to B but it was not built with privacy in mind so now we basically can make this happen at various layers in the stack building this Mix net that um we just heard about to basically inject privacy into this stack to be able to like access Digital Services and communicate with other parties without leaking metadata Ross your internet service provider Cloud providers autonomous system providers and yeah I think that's very important I guess we'll get later into the why and so on yeah thank you show of hands is it clear what a mix net is now yeah okay no so not so clear so okay hopefully throughout the panel we will make it clear so one one key point that I think I want to bring out from what uh both of our speakers said is that what a mixet do is that it allows you to actually hide not just the data but the metadata so the data about the data that you're using on the internet which is something that most uh you know privacy technology does not do and that's the key Innovation um now when when I look at Hopper and Nim um there is a movement let's say of going from protocol now from to a product strategy where you're focusing on actually providing a VPN so for Hopper I believe it's called the is VPN and for Nim is the Nim VPN uh can you maybe say uh like why are you choosing this product strategy and then you know why call it a VPN when you have a mix net on the back end I'll let you go first all right so uh why do we do this because um yeah so we had conversations with nosis and nosis is pretty interested in a in a VPN so for the ones who don't know noes it's a kind of decentralized Technologies ecosystem that builds a bunch of fantastic things such as the most secure way to store your money uh such as you know the most unable way of trading your money for another asset called cow swab and yeah so basically a VPN um connects well to this stack of uh products that are all very much trying to be censorship resistant and self custodial and they understand that all of that doesn't make much sense when they people and companies out there which can trace everything you do out there like I sometimes say decentralization is great but decentralization basically just allows for much more and much worse data harvesting than even Facebook Okay Facebook is great compared to blockchains yeah so I want to say that again for the people in the back Facebook is fantastic compared to public blockchains yeah so we really need to make a much work much much harder on privacy across the entire technology stack if we want any sort of truly decentralized technology to become reality and so that's why in this in this nosis context um we want to help them provide exactly that so we want you know you to be able to access any sort of decentralized services without in between there being many companies actually it's not just State actors like many times the thing in the traditional literature people talked about State actors and like you know what the US goes Rogue well you know that's already happened so um but now there's all these companies that's not just us companies it's multinational companies that run the internet that run the infrastructure that our society rests on and these are the actors that are increasingly powerful that increasingly see data and connection metadata like you know me talking to you and infer information from that and that needs to be protected that needs to be made available to normal users vpns is something that's kind of doable you install something in your laptop and you don't need to understand stuff but from that point your computer speaks a language that is privacy respecting and allows Anonymous routing and yeah mixnet is the thing under the hood that makes that magic happen that's my attempt at making these things fit together um yeah so first of all I completely agree like I think it's it's important to kind of hammer in uh the point that blockchains are terrible for privacy generally speaking um and you know the kind of another major reason for that is you know you don't just have kind of user data that's out on the clear net what happens is you've got like infrastructure data that's out on the clear net right and that opens up a whole other set of vulnerabilities that are quite unique to the blockchain space um and that's maybe something that we can go into um after actually um but uh but that's not the primary reason that we're doing a Nim uh VPN the reason why we're launching Nim VPN is because we want mix Nets into the hands of ordinary people as fast as possible um and when you look at the actual VPN Market it's absolutely huge a lot a lot of people are using vpns and many many more people are increasingly using vpns um and quite a few of them actually assume that vpn's protect their privacy um but a large part of the the VPN industry are um scumbags to put it uh mildly um you know especially free vpns um many times they actually Harvest user data and send it sell it on um so VPN are not just like bad for privacy they're like they're they're terrible for privacy um so this is one of the reasons why we're launching a VPN is to enter that market and and radically disrupt it very interesting um so when I look at something like th um some friend called I mean if you see how Thor is funded a lot of the funding comes from the US military uh which is kind of a contradiction in terms um and since you mentioned now the US going rogue uh many times uh Sebastian I wonder um how do you imagine mix Nets becoming economically uh sustainable economically viable so that you don't have to depend neither on uh you know cor corporations big corporations and also uh things like the US government yeah I mean I think this is actually sometimes people ask me like Why Haven't mix Nets actually happened right and there's a number of reasons but I think one important one is that it's about incentives if you want to run something at internet scale let's think about what runs at internet scale is AWS right yes it's centralized Amazon web services is centralized would Jeff basos have you know put up Computing centers with thousands and thousands of computers if we had the expectations that compute is free that's ridiculous right they wouldn't so I think mix Nets and some of that infrastructure hasn't happened because there were no incentives now I think with you know public settlement layers of financial value that some people call blockchains we do have that like how would you have paid for any sort of decentralized service providers before PayPal send cash in like an envelope velope you know and funnily enough uh some people tried that right so that's I think what uh when when um actually when when telegram was blocked they had kind of this funny cat and mouse game and had to incentivize people to to spin up servers so that's really a mess and actually public settlement layers such as blockchains and related stuff is actually pretty cool for that so you know I think this is fantastic so how does that happen we now have decentralized Technologies we had that a long time obviously right but now we have decentralized technologies that can be combined with money to incentivize anonymously people who run that infrastructure without going through approved and you know State consented channels and I find it amazing um yeah this is like a a really great ping pong because we can just add on each other's points so um yes all of the above um and uh I don't know I think there's a a few interesting things to talk about in the context of privacy Tech um and crypto because um I don't know what your experiences or the rest of the people in this space but typically speaking a lot of like um people in the kind of privacy Tech space are quite skeptical of crypto um for a lot of good reasons uh let me say cryptocurrency because you know just using the term crypto um obviously pisses them off when you're talking about tokens um and I think what's interesting and unique about tokens is that they they do several different things right this isn't money this is tokens and it does something slightly different to money um there's a value element to it but there's actually also a technical element to it right um so when we're talking about decentralized mix Nets um what the token actually allows for is a decentralized um directory Authority so what that means is that you can have a permissionless open infrastructure um and what governs the you know the the inclusion in the direct directory Authority are the tokens so we see here a kind of actually a very neat uh technical problem that's solved through you know tokens that includes an element of Economics because there's a certain kind of Cil resistance to that um and it of course also includes the the incentive element so you know this is an argument that I like to bring to kind of the Privacy hardcore spaces I'm sure this is a much more friendly argument or friendly audience um but I think it's a it's a point that's worth making um and then in terms of economic sustainability overall like I said earlier you know when you're looking at the VPN Market is a very large Market um so what we're really trying to do also by entering that market is to close the economic Loop here so you know so far we've had a bootstrapping mechanism which is the mix mining pool um in the case of nim um which has been bootstrapping our community of operators to set up their nodes and kind of get the kind of operations up to scratch and really kind of functioning well um but that bootstrapping mechanism tails off you know in time with adoption of of the mixnet initially via the Nim VPN through paid usage so we're looking at a kind of virtuous cycle here where operators you know get um increasing rewards from from real users so can to clarify the this point so you're saying that uh Nim Works in a way where you have paid um like basically mix mix notes mix that's how you call them that you know are providing the infrastructure and are getting paid for it in the N token but then at the same time you're going to have paid subscribers for the bpn is that correct yes exactly yeah I wanted to had some uh some point to it like this crypto networks what they allowed us or what they brought us is atomicity right and just as a a super small um you know example for that there's been like a hilarious um I think it was like over hundred million transaction of in Germany of a fantastic bank that made in fantastic investment it was actually a swap now the swap is you sent a couple of1 million somewhere and you get some other stuff back and you do that all the time and you make a little bit of money now there was one issue the counter party was called Leman and account Lan yeah the bank now and that bank was bankrupt in that moment so all that money went down the drain it was a lot of money so that's an example of a transaction which is not Atomic right it can happen that only half the stuff you expect to happen really does happen that's really really bad now what we have on blockchains is either the entire thing happens or nothing happens because everything gets rolled back so if you buy yourself a100 million of some shitcoin on Unis swap you can be guaranteed that this whole thing goes through but you're certainly not going to lose $100 million now in terms of mix Nets what this brought to us and this is kind of the incentives of Hopper is not swapping a shitcoin for another shitcoin but it's basically to pay money which is atomically coupled to the underlying Network utility which is forwarding data packets privately so we call this it it's a little bit similar to what nimas we call it proof of relay so you relay data and with the acknowledgement you can couple that to a payment that's what I find very cool because such features allow you to do that trustless in a decentralized world thank you um maybe uh so just for a bit of context so recently the US government has sent some letters to uh crypto companies such as Unis Swap and also consensus in the US um there is a largely growing concern that the US interventionism into the crypto space will break the promise of censorship resistance how do mixnet support uh that promise of blockchains of that early sort of cyberpunk Promise of censorship resistance and then uh second question I want to move in a bit into AI because I know um Harry is talking a lot about um how the mix Nets help to counter AI risk so yeah um censorship is a big topic and it's going to become an increasingly big topic um there's a couple different angles to that question uh like first of all there's like the question of access which is an ongoing R&D topic like you know just you know the question of like whether mix Nets are censored for example is something that our R&D team is constantly looking at and observing and working with our communities around the world to to keep checking um because it's a bit of a cat and mouse game so anyone who actually builds Tech that that attempts to be censorship resistant in a real way um it really is cat and mouse because people are kind of like watching and developing new techniques all the time um but the bigger the other question that you mentioned when it comes to the uh the censorship resistance in the crypto space um this is where I think it's interesting to talk a bit about um validator privacy for example and much more kind of like targeted censorship um that you know has to do with you know let's say having information that puts you in a position where you become a target for law enforcers um and that's what we you know see increasingly on the kind of like validator and and Company side is that when you actually hold data you become a target for uh you know law enforcement whether you like it or not and so and and you have to comply you know it's very hard to not and we're seeing the you know the the consequences of that um so really you know the best strategy to my mind here is data minimization and this is why strong privacy protection becomes so important because you want to minimize the amount of data that you actually hold in order to to you know mitigate that risk on a business level basically and also to make sure that you can make good on the Promises to your users and make good of the promises of the industry overall which was one of the core Promises of you know blockchain from the early days was censorship resistance so but just like privacy we actually see that blockchains are terrible for censorship resistance um because they're not private so you know that's a major problem that we need to that we need to solve and that we're looking into to to doing um so yeah both like validator privacy is super important privacy between you know full nodes and light clients you know traffic that's flowing between wallets and chains um and uh and of course like the entire um Network layer let's say yeah I I think there is uh to to add to that I think there's this relatively unreflected statement of uh data is the new gold for whom is that gold exactly um well not for the individual right so data is actually uh the new nuclear waste and um we have to get rid of nuclear waste right and how do you do that well you do that by strong privacy Tech so um yeah basic basically it doesn't help you if you have powerful Technologies if somebody observes everything you do and of course people can always shut something off you know worst case people can and for example nation states can switch off the internet and yes that does happen even if it sounds crazy um so I think it starts with the observability and the observability of interactions between parties is a very important one in there if you remove that you remove a lot of observability and therefore for you know shutdown ability and that's good um so thank you for that response um maybe just to ask again the question about AI risk uh and mix Nets what are the relationships there uh how to use in mix Nets supporting let's say you know minimizing the risk of AI uh if at all um I Heard the argument at a dinner some days ago that some people were arguing that oh crypto plus AI That's great and someone said actually no that would probably be bad for Humanity if you have a sensorship resistent system that's running on an AI That's a problem some people argue um how do mix Nets enter into this um so I could go super philosophical on this question um because actually runs really deep right um and uh you know yeah there's a philosophical element there's a technical element there's a political economy element um but the way that I like to think about it is like um taking is is to kind of take a step a step back and look at the entire data pipeline right and try to understand you know how AI came about in the first place um I was at an event um just yesterday in Paris with um Meredith Whitaker president of signal who's been very outspoken on this um and talks a lot about um AI as a surveillance derivative which is you know literally the case and it's such a good way to put it because you know AI is the kind of or AI as we see it in terms of large language models um is literally the result of you know a bit over a decade of continuous Mass surveillance and you know basically stealing everybody's content and information online um in order to feed into these models so where does privacy Tech come into it privacy Tech comes into it as a kind of literal blockade of that right it's it's a way to say like no you can't just steal all this data um in fact data shouldn't be something that's just out there for anybody to grab in that sort of a way um it should be something that is like uh rarely created in the first place in fact and when it is created it should be created with a very specific use in mind that is for the social good and for the for the benefit of a particular group of people and only then can it actually be meaningful to feed it into some sort of model in order to see whether it can kind of help with a specific use case um but the way that we see it at the moment is is you know it's one big it's it's a massive theft and it's based on surveillance and it's going to be used um in turn for increasingly fine grained um forms of targeting and surveillance as well and so like you know privacy Tech kind of enters in on both ends of the data pipeline let's say both as a kind of blockade in the kind of development of malicious and and kind of um you know AI that harms Society like from the start and then all the way through to at the other end in the actual implementation of AI driven surveillance um you know mix Nets in particular are likely going to be quite good protection for that because um AI relies so heavily on or machine learning you know is very good at analyzing metadata right so um the chief scientist at Nim Claudia Diaz she likes to call metadata the food for machines um and why is that because it's like it's highly structured and it's talking about patterns rather than the kind of like soft mushy stuff that we like to talk about between humans it's much more kind of like um yeah it's much kind of easy for machines to digest um and so you know protecting the metadata is going to be be increasingly important for protecting you know fundamental human rights in the age of when AI starts to be integrated into um harmful Technologies by you know effectively you know you know military um because that's you know military and policing is like one of the kind of major areas where we're seeing that roll out so um so yeah I think uh privacy preserving Technologies in general are super important um mix Nets are particularly important exactly because they obscure patterns right so um they they add noise to the signal that um machine learning algorithms are trying to surface um so yeah yeah that was very deep I am a a simple engineer and not an AI so I don't have too much to add to that but I would say to me it can go either way right it can go Skynet it can go that we use privacy Technologies to fight back against machines and I generally believe in a good prevailing over the evil just because I think most evil people are just stupid and you know uh if temporarily there is some evil people who are in power we will use and we will rely on strong privacy Technologies to have lat less data getting captured and used against us and I'm you know very much uh happy to work on that and specifically like we heard a few times how already without AI you know developers get prosecuted I'm very happy to contribute to technologies that will help individuals to stay free I think there's there's another point to add around um Ai and mixnuts in particular that I like to kind of think about which is the um uh the relationship between the collective and the individual so like you know what what you know machine learning you know likes to do is um kind of surface differences right in order to kind of like categorize and Target you know specific areas or like um let's say you know uses probabilities in order to surface like what's going to happen you know next but by cutting away the bits that don't matter which means it's categorizing all the time um whether it's the next pixel or you know the movement of a person or whatever um and so uh there is like something about the kind of that fine grained categorization and profiling that's inherent in you know artificial intelligence which is you know quite stifling in a way right it's both capturing of like you know the idea of like a a future with free will um and it's capturing of like the individual you become kind of like boxed into specific like categories um what's interesting about mix nuts is it does the inverse right it kind of like it it it adds noise to the signal it it collectivized things so the way the the Nim Mix net works is um anybody that's using the mixnet their traffic becomes cover traffic for everybody else right so it's a collective effort and in fact the more people use it the stronger it becomes and so you have this like Collective adding of like noise and refusal of closure and categorization that I think is like quite poetic on a deeper level as well beautiful um so maybe H to bring it down to more the concrete what are some of the applications that you're excited about that could be implemented with a mixnet um I remember um Lea from cuts and post told me once that mixnet applications are basically have to be designed with the mixet you cannot have some sort of application that is sort of you know independent from a mixet it kind of has to be embedded within the mixnet so you're saying anonymity loves company so what is what are the applications that you're excited about I'll I'll let you go first yeah so um the difficult part is I don't know exactly but I know it cannot be just trying to mimic the web too so in this kind of um crypto uh Financial space I see a lot of people who are going to we will decentralize Twitter like where the do you think that's going to converge on well we have to make faster transactions we have to get faster finality we have to get you know higher throughput well where do you think that's going to converge on AWS right so I think the really tricky part and that's why I can't really give you a specific answer is we have to rethink uh kind of how humans interact and I do not think that the current answer of the web 2 is what it should be because that is drawn to maximize profit for ever bigger Mega corporations we have to rethink how humans interact and then use novel Technologies for that because guess what mix Nets are pretty crap compared to you know how you interact with Netflix today guess what blockchains are actually pretty crap compared to how you interact with with your credit card or PayPal today guess what even Unis swap is actually pretty crap compared to how the New York Stock Exchange works so we have the opportunity to now build some absolutely novel interactions that were not possible so far so if we're limited to what many people do and that's you know I don't blame them that's simply how we work we try to mimic something that we like we trick to like Twitter so we try to improve Twitter but it's going to fail and you know still some people are going to raise good VC money for it and then hopefully myver linning again you know positive thinking is some of that will go into technology that makes sense in order to allow us to build applications not in the next three years it's going to take us more five to 15 years that actually you know maybe make it dense um yeah I mean mix Nets you know there's throughput and latency um issues you know a lot of those you know are being improved quite quickly through R&D so we're we're seeing a lot of like improvements on scalability and so on um at Nim um so you know I agree that hopefully we can get to some like pretty wild use cases coming out of mix Nets I think like it would be great to see you know what people can come up with um but I do think in the meantime there are some like immediate problems that are you know definitely worth solving so we've already talked a little bit about um the VPN industry um and you know we've talked a little bit about kind of validator privacy in the context of uh the web 3 Industry um so you know those are kind of like immediate use cases that I think like are you know absolutely like on the horizon um yeah and just yeah um uh maybe last question do you have any question for each other you you got us in a tough one yeah yeah so um what do I want to know from ja so on the Nim side um is Nim chain going to be smart contract enabled more than a mix net or is Nim chain just going to stay in your you know mixnet thing that's a very good question um we actually don't have a Nim chain per se um our chain is called NYX uh it's a cosmos um SDK chain and um right now it is absolutely servicing the mixnet um whether it's going to become you know something in its own right is a little bit of an unknown question right now um our main focus is absolutely on the mix mixnet adoption um for the time being yep uh my question for you would be um what else are you getting up to for Berlin blockchain week so I'm G to Shell my uh thank you J I'm going to sh my talk tomorrow at dcon which is just across the river talking about uh nosis VPN and uh I have was surprise on visualizing some things how you might get fingerprinted on the supposedly web 3 that you haven't thought about um for the ones who are not there I'll also tweet about it later thank you so um one last thing as well um if you're interested in more local first peer-to-peer protocols there's also a peer for appear on conference happening at offline you can look up offline dopl um if you're critical about you know the blockchain world and you know want to look for other type of protocols you can come on the weekend it's going to happen it's all self organized there is no panels there is no there is no plan people can come and self organize um I want to thank the speakers for H is there time for questions from the audience uh we can do two questions I mean I mean we are bit Democratic in that sense freedom to the people any questions hey hey mixnet deserves some questions oh here we go oh the whole cbas is a mixed name um what are the biggest research challenges in um mixnet design what are the biggest research um challenges in mixnet design um well the biggest in general in the field is like I guess it's hard to speak on behalf of everyone else but I can say what like our main focuses are for the next like few months in the R&D front um is uh censorship resistance and um improving latency and throughput of the mixnet so we're looking at kind of new forms of um packet formats and that sort of thing um to speed up the the whole Mix net usability is honestly like our number one one priority like this needs to be usable for people and you know those are kind of the two main challenges in terms of usability really is speed through put and then send censorship um to make sure that it's getting in the hands of the people that actually need it the most is is there an inherent trade-off between um latency and privacy um that's a very good question uh maybe one for like a drink afterwards cuz it's quite detailed yeah yeah so I would add uh one that is not limited to mix Nets but that's a real issue uh is um you know boot stripping and Eclipse resistance you know I think most people try to trick that somehow for example by uh diverting it to another system that's what we do it's called a blockchain and uh that's one of the reasons why we don't run our own uh because we're a small team and there's others that are addressing that um yeah as we've heard the uh so-called anonymity trma making uh useful trade-offs there between strong anonymity low latency and uh low bandwidth overhead um making application specific smart trade-offs there and I would say the third one is which is kind of new compared to mixet literature is this whole incentive part right so incentives are great but compared to the history of mixet literature that's not really been in a whole lot of uh studies of of cryptographic or cryptoeconomic security that will be very interesting to see in the next decade or so I guess thank you is there like a known number of nodes that somebody would have to control to be able to sort of figure out something within the mix note um yes uh but it's kind of so to kind of try to explain a little bit at least how the Nim mix Network um you know when you look at the ability to construct a malicious path let's say through the mixnet um it is pretty difficult because what we've got we've got three layers of nodes um and uh each layer has you know a lot of different nodes um each packet gets sent through a different route on each layer so even if you're able to construct one full route that's malicious all you all you actually are able to find out is the route of one single packet um so in order to understand like enough packets to actually con reconstruct the full message would be extremely challenging um so yeah it's I don't have an exact number for you but it's a lot yeah I I guess the the annoying answer is always you know it depends what you're after and a little bit like like Jay suggested if you would just want to find out I'm talking to you and you know you have tough luck no matter if it's like Nim or Hopper it's the same thing you could just be unlucky that you know this first second and third note let's say it's a root of three nodes were controlled by an adversary well you know you're so but what do they learn they just learn that I and you were exchanging one data packet right so then you know the question is is that an issue and uh what can we do beyond that thank you um so J you said at the start that uh your that Nim's uh plan is to get the uh the mixnet VPN into the hands of people as fast as possible he seem to emphasize that I I suspect I know why that is but would you like to say more or either of you if you have the same plan would You' like to say more about why that is and like what you you know how how you you foresaw it projected it out yeah I mean well I can give a very vague answer which is basically I think we all know that geopolitic ically things are heating up a lot um and so you know the security problems that Ordinary People are going to be facing are going to be increasing quite a lot and so yeah it having you know basic security on that front um for ordinary people especially as they go about you know trying to resist increasing authoritarian regimes is pretty important so okay that wasn't what I expeced I thought you were say because if we don't do it quickly they'll stop us there that that what I thought you were going to say if we don't do it quickly that stop us oh right um yeah well yeah there is always the there is always the risk that they're going to try and stop us let's say it's not so much like launching the VPN um quickly that that solves that it's decentralizing um you know certain aspects quickly that that kind of solves that um make sure that the technology kind of can carry on let's give a big round of applause for our speakers thank you J thank you Sebastian